Tuesday, September 23, 2008

I saw it sitting on a table towards the back and I thought of my fellow blogger, Reynie,and I couldn't help but buy it. She, being Reynie, has this great collection of crosses hanging on one of her many decorated walls and I thought it would make a great addition!

Reynie, I will give it to my Dad who can give it to Angela who in turn can give it to you! Hope you like enjoy it!

Monday, September 22, 2008

Wow! What a busy day today. I finally got a chance to sit down at a computer for a little bit of leisure time. Did everyone have a good weekend? I did! I went yard-sellin' all by myself. I hit 4 right her in the big city of Hampton and then I made my way down to a flea market that's about 2 miles away. Look what found at the second yard sale I came across.

As ya'll know, I have A LOT of dogs and that means A LOT of dog food. Well, I have been trying to find something that was not plastic and see through to keep all that food in. I found this old potato bin, painted it black (it was country blue, ick!) and wallah! A dog food bin!

One of my main finds of the day was a new coffee table for my living room. The old one was so big and took up so much space. I just bought a new rug ( a steal at target) and wanted something smaller so the rug could be seen. Take a look at this.

Its all beat up and scratched but it's perfect!! I almost cried when I saw it! It was ten bucks and it made my whole day! I'm trying to figure out what to do with it. ....to paint or not to paint....stain or not to stain.

Friday, September 19, 2008

I have absolutely nothing planned for this weekend and that's the way I like it! Believe it or not, we just got cable at our house yesterday! We have had no satellite dish or anything for years. We just didn't want to pay for something you could get for free. We have two big screen plasma TV's with a HD antenna on on top of our house. The quality of the picture is amazing! It's actually better than cable because the signal doesn't have to travel through the cables or something (no idea). Anyway, I think I'm going to plop myself on the couch and watch Rachael Ray and the History Channel for hours. I may not even leave the house.

I also got a new laptop last week and with the new cable we now have wireless Internet! I feel so "new-age". I can sit on the couch with my laptop and blog away! What fun! I may hit a yard sale or two. Reynie has inspired me to go out and find some old chairs. I love the look of those beat up old kitchen table chairs and I have the perfect spot in my house for one. I searched the adds for some close by yard sales and found some estate sales at old homes just down the street. Who knows what I will end up with!

I hope everybody has a safe and fabulous weekend! I hope I get to read about lots of fun stuff on Monday! Toot-A Loo!!

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Last but not least, you are going to meet Penny. Penny has only been with us for about six months. Despite her short time with the clan she has really become our “little princess”. She has an entire wardrobe consisting of everything from raincoats to dresses to hoodies (which are her favorite). She has her own little pink princess dish for her special food. Even goes to work with me every day where she has her own little pink bed to relax in as Mommy works.Penny came to us under strange circumstances. Two children (maybe 10 or 12 years old) walked up in the yard one day holding this tiny dog that they thought was a puppy. I, being so incredibly smart, new that this puppy was a much older dog. They said she had been dumped out on the road and their parents would not let them keep her so they were trying to find her a home. Well, I’m a sucker and told the heart-broken children that I would keep her and try and find where she belonged. I just did not believe the story about her being dumped out. She is a full blooded Chihuahua and a Senior. Who could do such a thing?

The following day I put up signs about a lost dog, called all the pounds in the surrounding counties and posted an ad on Petfinder.com. The ad ran for 4 weeks and I called the pounds every other day to see if anyone was looking for their lost baby. No Luck. No one ever responded to the lost dog signs and I never got a phone call from the ad posted on the Internet.Jason didn’t want to keep her. He was adamit about finding her home or finding a place for her to live. I was adamit about keeping her and I was NEVER going to give in. I had wanted a Chihuahua ever since I fell in love with one of my best friends. His name is Tad and he is the cutest thing I had ever seen. So tiny and bouncy and lovable….I had to have one of my own. But how? I am so against buying from backyard breeders and pet stores and the rescues are impossible to deal with when you already have FIVE other dogs. I really think God sent her to me because 3 weeks later my sweet Missy died. He knew I was going to go crazy (I did anyway) if I didn't have something else to focus on. I love this little dog and she LOVES me.

1. I totally pick at my toenails. Maybe that's more gross than weird!2. I cannot stand the smell of toothpaste! And if someone else is brushing their teeth in my presence I swear I will puke! The slobber and ickyness of it all mixed together just kills me! It odoesn't bother me when I am brushing my own teeth, thank goodness, but when other folks do.....YUCK!3. I have a tiny little gap between my two front teeth and I always do this weird thing were I try to blow out the food that gets stuck there when I eat. Dental floss maybe? To easy!4. I have to have leather furniture but I don't want to sit on leather. I have to put a blanket down. Go figure.5. I am obsessed with changing the sheets on my bed. And thanks to Kari, I have to have at least a 350 thread count.6. I used to be TERRIFIED to fly even though my dad is a pilot. One day, I just got over it and now I fly all the time.

I would tag some folks but I am so new at this that I don't know anyone to tag! I hope everybody doesn't think I'm too weird now!

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Oh, my sweet pitiful Hanz Dog. Hanz has been around since the first day I met Jason. He was born June 26, 1996. The man that raised him until he was six months old was not really a dog person. He bought Hanz because he liked the appearance of a Weimaraner. He new nothing about the breed, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but let's just say Weims are a handful. He had no patience with Hanz and according to Jason's mother (her boyfriend at the time was Hanz's owner) he was not very nice to him. His mother brought Hanz to Jason when he was a six month old lanky legged puppy with no manners to speak of. If you don't know anything about Weims, here's a little info: THEY ARE BRILLIANT AND HIGH STRUNG AS HELL!!!! Thank goodness Jason was out of work for six months (due to an accident) when he got Hanz because all he did was train, train, train. He trained him to "go to bed" (when he was in trouble he was told this and he would go to Jason's bed and sit there until he was told to come out), play dead, sit, stay and lay down. He also was taught hand signals for all of the commands.

I could go on for hours about this guy. He has done so many crazy things like peeing on my neighbors back to bringing home bread in the middle of the night every time he escaped the fence. I am so afraid he doesn't have much time left with us. He is now blind in one eye, deaf and has arthritis. His balance isn't what it used to be and he sure doesn't have the energy he used to. He has a hard time getting up and down stairs and on occasions his legs will just give out. It's so hard watching him get old knowing what a strong and active dog he was. He still is the center of my husbands life. I don't think Jason will ever love another dog as much as he loves Hanz and when his day comes, I may have to put Jason down with him.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Lady Bug is another one of our "rescues". My neighbor had seen her on the side of a busy 4 lane highway for several days last October.

She had just had pups and you can see from the picture above that she was starving! My neighbor has a dog that is very shy and does not like the company of other dogs. So she asked me to keep her until she could find her a home. Of course I said yes and She fit right in with all my other hoodlums.

She was very trusting from the start, had the sweetest displacement, and seemed to be a great dog. Needless to say we fell in love pretty fast. My neighbor did all the searching for the owners. She also searched for the puppies she had recently had in the brush on the side of the road where she had seen her those couple of days but to no avail. I was secretly wishing she would not find her owners or a new home. Is was as if she had always been a part of our little clan.

A month or so past and I knew she was mine for sure the day I picked her up from the vet after being spayed. A young vet assistant brought her to the front as I was paying the bill. I was standing around the corner and she could not see me. I said something to the lady at the front desk and that was all it took. She bolted from from the unsuspecting assistant, jerking the leash right out of his hand, rand around the corner and plowed into me. Her tail wagging ferociously and whimpering the whole time. She jumped up and wrapped her front legs around my waist as if she were hugging me. All this because she heard my voice. I hadn't even said her name. I called my neighbor that day and told her to stop looking for her a new home. She was mine.

As you can see, she plumped up in a very short period of time. This is her right after she was spayed. She actually isn't fat. This is just not a very flattering picture :-). She now spends her days chasing squirrels in the back yard, harassing the cats in the neighborhood and slobbering all over me when she gets the chance. She scares everybody to death that comes in contact with her but she is more scared of them. She also has a pink bed.

Friday, September 12, 2008

My next fur kid I will introduce you to does not have a sob story like the previous baby. As a matter of fact she couldn't survive one day in the "wild". She is the only one I have had since she was a puppy and she is rotten to the core.

We got Ellie three days after Jason and I were married (07-19-2002). Two weeks before the big day we lost one of our other bassets, Sally Girl. She was only two years old. Needless to say Jason and I were devastated. I wanted to call off the wedding and not leave the house for a very long time. But my Dad intervened and talked a little sense into my head and we got married.

We were married in Gatlinburg, TN on a Friday, stayed for a couple of days in a log cabin in the mountains, and were home by Sunday night. During those two weeks after Sally died and before we got married I cried buckets of tears and moped around the house. I never thought I would get over her sudden death. She was a shy little thing and only loved her Daddy and I. She was never friends with a stranger, never mean, just very standoffish. When she died she was surrounded by strangers (she was at the vet) and I could hardly stand to think she was scared because Mommy and Daddy were no where to be found. It took a long time for me to get over that feeling of guilt.

That Monday I had had enough of that lump in my throat. I wanted a puppy to ease the pain. I didn't want to replace Sally, but what better cure for sadness than a stinky little puppy, right? So we drove over to Fayetteville and picked out the CUTEST red and white basset hound and named her Ellie. She was the sweetest, cutest, lovable thing I had ever seen UNTIL we got her home.

She did not stop screaming, I mean SCREAMING, for almost three weeks straight. If she was awake she was screaming. If she was eating, she was screaming with a mouth full of food. If she was pottying, she was screaming. No whininginvolved. She was actually screaming! It was terrible. It was annoying. It was the worse sound I ever heard. Most folks would have taken her straight back to where she came from but we persevered. After those three weeks of Hell, I guess she finally realized that we weren't so bad and finally shut her mouth.

Ellie rules the nest in our home. That includes us. She is gentle and has a huge personality. For a basset hound she is quite intelligent. She's no Einstein but she holds her own. She has given me 6 and a half years of loyalty and never judges a thing I do. Who could ask for a better friend?

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Let me introduce you to my children. Currently, I have five hooligans taking up my space, shedding all over the place, slobbering, passing gas, and just plain dirtying up my house but I wouldn't trade them for a ride in an F-14 with the Blue Angels. That is a huge statement if you know me. If not, that's a blog for a whole nother day.

First, let's meet Little Baby Girl (Little Girl for short).

As you can see, this little baby is missing one of her back legs. But it doesn't slow her down one bit! She is the happiest dog of the bunch. Don't get me wrong, they are all happy dogs but I think Little Girl realizes she is on life #2 and she is making the best of it!

The day Little Girl came into my life was one of the coldest February days I can remember. The wind was howling but it was just as sunny as could be. I don't think it made it above freezing and the nights were in the single digits. I live in Hampton near Atlanta Motor Speedway and I am a huge NASCAR fan. I usually can't avoid the racetrack if I go out and being such an avid fan of the sport I always turn my head and look. That day, Little Girl was lucky I was a NASCAR fan because on my way home from town I did exactly that. Turned my head to see the racetrack and there was this little dog being harassed by geese in the grass field parking lots of Atlanta Motor Speedway. I giggled at the sight but then I REALLY saw her. She was skin and bones and not walking on one of her back legs. At first I kept on going because I have to be rational and say, "Natalie, you can't save 'em all". Well that lasted for about 3 seconds and I immediately turned around. As I drove back by I did not see her. I went and parked in the open field and walked to where I had first seen her. She was nowhere to be found. I figured she ran off to her next appointment and that God would lead her to her next meal, which she needed desperately. If I don't think like that I would go crazy!

I hopped back in my car and drove away, knowing that I had tried. As I started to pull away, there she was. Standing about 100 feet directly in front of me digging in the ground for something she thought would ease those pains in her belly. This time, I drove up to her. But that didn't work, as she took off running across the field and into another lot adjacent to the one I was currently spinning dirt in trying to catch the little booger.

I knew I was going to have to coax her to even get near me but with what? I had a bunch of toilet paper and cleaning supplies in my car. Sure, she needed a bath but I doubted that was what her fancy was at the moment. I had to get some food. There was a Family Dollar right across the street from AMS so I scooted over there and picked up a bag of dog food all the while hoping she was still there when I got back. I pulled into the lot where I last saw her. I spotted her in the corner at the bottom of a steep bank. I parked my car at the top of the hill and pored out a huge pile of food. She was watching me the whole time wondering what this crazy lady was up to but still didn't look the least bit interested in me until she caught a whiff of what I had. Her nose went up in the air and it started twitching. I called and called her to come get a sample but she would rather starve to death than have anything to do with me. So, my stealth mode kicked in and I hid in my car about 20 feet from the "trap". About 20 minutes passed and I couldn't believe that she hadn't come to get a taste of what made her nose twitch. I got out of the car, walked to the top of the hill and there she was. About 3 feet from the pile of food. I crouched down and used my sweetest voice and started calling to her, "Come here Little Baby Girl" and at the same time tears started streaming down my face as I could see the extent of her condition. You could see every bone. She had lacerations all over her face, and legs. She had a fungus growing on her underside and her leg was broken. Her little tail wagged but she was still unsure of me. I guess she decided since she had been this brave, she may as well stay and eat.

I sat there on the side of this bank, with the wind almost freezing my tears as they left my eyes, and wondered what to do with this pitiful baby. I had to take her home. I could not leave her in this condition, in this cold, to die. So, that's what I did, calling her Little Baby Girl the whole time and crying, snot slinging everywhere, wondering how this happened.

The thing is, none of that matters now. Now she sleeps on a pink bed at the foot of mine and has something for her belly everyday. And the three legs she has left are spring loaded.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

This post is from my Myspace Blog dated August 2006. I just thought it deserved to be somewhere nicer! Enjoy.....

Okay, I know I have told some of you this traumatizing story but I feel that I must share this with everyone on earth because it is just the craziest thing in the world!I work in sales so my day off is Monday. I use this day to be the laziest person in the world. If there were an award for laziness I would surely win it on this day. This past Monday I had set up camp on the couch with my half blind and completely deaf dog. He was snoozing on one side and I was channel surfing on the other. After about two hours of Rachel Ray and various snippets of about 30 movies I decided I needed to take a much needed visit to the bathroom. Now, hear is where it gets interesting......As I rose from my comfortable laziness on the couch my feet touched the floor and low and behold a F*****G SNAKE was striking at me!!!! Not a small baby garden snake, a huge mean ass snake almost 50 feet long and 30 inches in diameter! Okay, not really, but let me see you stand up in your living room and have a snake strike at you. That's how big it seemed at that moment. Actually it was about 2 1/2 - 3 feet long....that's a big snake when you are not expecting it! I don't really remember jumping completely out of my skin but it did happen. I found myself standing on the back of my couch screaming like a little bitch. It was almost an out of body experience....not really processing what I was seeing...almost like a dream. Finally I came back to reality and realized that I was probably going to have to burn my house down. I started wondering were the gas can was and the f****r struck at me again!!!! All this time my dog is still SLEEPING on the other end of the couch. Some help he was. I finally understood that I had to get the hell out of my house or I was going to be eaten slowly by this asshole that had been watching T.V. with me for no telling how long. "Sorry to have disturbed you slumber Mr. Snake." After my muscles thawed from the unexpected freezing, I climbed over every piece of furniture in my house. I was careful not to touch the floor because if I did I was sure that no one would ever hear from me again. I reached the door and bolted outside to the safety of my front porch which I was sure was going to be my new home for the next year. All I could think about was selling my house and moving far, far away. Thoughts of sleeping in my car, moving back in with my parents, moving in with friends and even becoming homeless all filtered through my brain. All of these ideas were much better than living with a snake in my house. For some reason I kept thinking about "Snakes on a Plane" and wondering if I could hire Samuel L. Jackson to rid my house of all the deadly creatures lurking in my living room. Finally I decided that I had to deal with it myself. But how? I've never had a snake in my house before so I didn't have any "rid-o-snake" tools lying around. Being the excellent gardener that I am, there happened to be a pair of hedge trimmers sitting next to the front door. No... I didn't chop it in half.....that would be to much blood and guts that I would have to clean up. Instead I had the brilliant idea of using it as a poking device. Not real sure how that was going to solve my problem but you come up with a better idea after you find a 50 foot long snake watching T.V. with you! I set off on my quest by peeking around the front door into the living room. There he was, sitting right where I had left him (Thank God). I proceeded to poke at "Little Satan" (my new nick-name for the beast) and of course he tried to kill the hedge clippers. This scared the s**t out of me and I ran outside, again. As I ran outside Little Satan slithered into my bathroom for refuge. Then somehow I gathered my composure once again and headed to the bathroom to confront this little asshole that had ruined my day off. As I headed in that direction I noticed a box full of books in the spare bedroom. All of the sudden a light bulb went off in my head......Round up Little Satan into the box!!! BRILLIANT! I dumped all the books out and attached the box to the end of my poking device. As I rounded the corner my nemesis was trying to crawl up the cabinet in the bathroom and of course the little f****r struck at me again. By this time I had had enough and it was on! I cornered him with my "rid-o-snake" device and low and behold I captured Little Satan. Victory at last!! NOT! (as Chandler Bing would say). I was too slow to close the lid on the box and Little Satan was again loose in my bathroom. Not to worry I thought...I am now a pro. I repeated my last move and this time did not allow that little son of a bitch to escape. There I was in my bathroom with Little Satan in a box. I was sweating like those people in Gatoradecommercials. I slid the box all the way outside, refusing to pick it up because we all know that if you feel the snake moving around inside the box you will die. Finally the saga was over. The box was outside and the snake was not in my house. Although that really doesn't matter...I think I still need to burn my house down. And by the way....the dog was still asleep on the couch.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

I just realized why blogging is going to be the BEST thing EVER. I went shoe shopping today, one of my favorite past times, and now I get to show my shoes to the world!! Nothing makes me happier than new shoes. See, I told you my life was quite different than yours! Look at these:

I have no idea what I'm going to wear them with but I'm sure I'll find something. The ones on the bottom are my favorite. In the picture they look like snake skin but they are actually gingham (like a little checker board) with a little bow!I have new shoes and I'm happy! Hope your day turns out as good as mine!

I have been reading two blogs for a while now and I figured It's time for me to get in the game! My cousin's wife, Angela, has this great little blog about her family and all the things that happen in this wonderful little town where she lives. She tells all sorts of stories about her children, family gatherings, first days of school and what the men do for "fun".

The other blog I have become addicted to is her sister-in-law, Reynie. I went to school with Reynie back in the day and it's nice to see what old friends are doing now. She blogs about crafts and veggies and decorating. She is a wonderful cook and post all sorts of recipes for us to try.

That being said I thought I would like to let folks know what someone like me (married with no children) gets into everyday. I figured that since I am facinated by their lifestyle, they may be interested in mine! So here I go......I'm gonna give everybody a glimpse of what it's like to be "Married With No Children"!

About Me

Hi! My name is Natalie, most folks call me Nat Rat, and I live in a small town south of the big city Atlanta! I've been married to the sweetest man, Jason, for a little more than six years and we have five wonderful DOGS! No kids here. I love the little boogers but I just don't want any for myself. I work at a small family owned car dealership as the controller. I love my job, the people I work with and my friends are some of the most loyal I have ever met. My familly is what is most important to me and my Dad is number one in my book! I love to laugh and eat and never turn down a frosty cold beer!